Did racist woman call cops on Boston police chief? Not so fast

In December 2025, videos circulated on Facebook (archived here and here) and Instagram (archived) claiming that a white woman called the police on her neighbor — who, it turned out, was Boston’s chief of police. 

In one video, the woman appeared to question a Black man who told her he had “just moved in last week.” She told him he “looked suspicious” and said she would call the police before the man identified himself as the city’s top cop.

Other videos sharing the claim appeared to be from a TV news broadcast, with an off-camera reporter narrating the events. Snopes readers asked us to verify whether the story was legitimate.

The video and its accompanying story were fake. Snopes identified signs in the footage, narration and script that were hallmarks of content generated with artificial intelligence tools.

AI tools often struggle to accurately display perspective, as seen at one point in the purported security footage when one of the man’s ears disappears into his head. Similarly, the hallway rug appeared to bleed into the slightly opened apartment door.

The supposed neighbor’s delivery also sounded flat and robotic in emotional moments, while the off-screen narration contained unusual inflections and abnormal breathing patterns — all of which are telltale signs of AI generation.

Additionally, the script contained phrasing that suggested an AI tool wrote it. For example, the off-screen narrator said the woman in the video “protected her own prejudice.” Journalists would likely avoid such language to maintain impartiality. 

Although some versions of the video appeared to be from a news broadcast, no reputable outlet had published a story detailing such an incident. 

To top it all off, the story contained blatant factual errors. While the videos claimed that Boston’s police chief was a man named Marcus Thompson, the chief of Boston’s police department at the time the videos circulated was Michael Cox. The videos claimed the supposed confrontation happened in the “Glendale Arms” apartment complex. Searching for that term revealed exactly one apartment building with that name — located more than 300 miles away in Philadelphia.

For further reading, we’ve also debunked AI-generated videos that claimed to show a sanitation worker rescuing a baby and a Russian man in a boat saving a bear cub.